Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Nothing’s lost in classic play’s translation into the physical language of ballet
ballet
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
Scottish Ballet
The Crucible, Edinburgh
★★★★
“Words often fail to tell us how we feel and movement can do that,” claims composer Peter Salem. Choreographer Helen Picket has chosen possibly Arthur Miller’s most powerfully emotional play for Scottish Ballet to test that theory.
Picket’s narrative ballet faithfully follows Miller’s plot dealing with the 17th-century Salem witch trials in a society trapped in its web of moral fundamentalism. Even an audience unfamiliar with the play would easily follow the action.
The music is equally programmatic, with repetitive menacing rhythms only occasionally moving into sometimes plaintive lyricism to mark the more intimate moments.
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
GORDON PARSONS relishes a fast moving production of Sheridan’s comic masterpiece
GORDON PARSONS relishes a play that reveals how language carries much more than simple communication
